


i of the storm

by nirav



Series: open my chest and color my spine [2]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, Gen, Winter Soldier AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-06
Updated: 2017-02-18
Packaged: 2018-07-12 18:37:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7117888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirav/pseuds/nirav
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The chair doesn’t look familiar, but both her human arm and her metal one fit neatly into the armrests, the leather compressed under and around them, between her fingers.  Her teeth fit perfectly into the notches in the mouthpiece.</p>
<p>[Winter Soldier AU]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> You don't have to have read [the first part of this mess](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6576940) to follow the story below, but it would probably help.
> 
> **Please Note:** There is violence in this fic. It isn't graphic, but this chapter specifically will include mentions of torture, so please consider this a **trigger warning**.

It’s supposed to be easy.

Not war.  War isn’t supposed to be easy, even if it’s cold.  Not spying, or disappearing, or living in rat-infested closets underground in St. Petersburg, the essential and underappreciated go-between for her spies and her country.  Not finding out over the public team radio that she’s under investigation for conduct unbecoming and homosexual activity, just as she’s about to walk out the door with a team to for a meet.

This was supposed to be easy, though.  A simple dead drop and recovery of recordings, left by her most competent asset, for her to pick up; a team at her back with scopes and rifles and unwavering support.

Instead, their intel is bad.  Instead, her asset is gunned down just as he drops the briefcase.  Instead, Alex is catapulting from her hiding spot, because her asset-- her teammate, her  _ friend--  _ is surely dead but the recordings are still essential.  Instead, when a cavalcade of Soviet police close in on her position, cutting off her escape and leveling weapons at her, when her cavalry should be riding in to fight her and the intel out, when her team should be protecting her the way she’s protected them, she’s left on her own.

A disdainful officer approaches, sauntering through the snow, and sneers at her as she struggles against the four holding her still.  He looks her up and down slowly, sneer curling into a repugnant smile, and snaps his fingers at one of his soldiers.  The butt of a rifle slams into the back of her head and she crumbles, her legs giving out as she struggles to stay conscious.  The snow is cold under her face and a foot slams into her ribs once, twice, and she finally, blissfully, passes out.

It was supposed to be easy.

* * *

It’s swelteringly, ungodly hot when she wakes up.  The layers she wore for the cold winter above ground are sweat-heavy and chafing against her skin almost as much as the heavy leather cuffs around her wrists.  She’s been awake for hours, long enough for her vision to clear and her head to pound with every heartbeat, and all she’s been able to tell of the room is that it’s windowless and metal and overheated.  She doesn’t have a cyanide capsule in her teeth like the active assets do because in all the years of the cold war, not a single handler has ever been captured because every handler is a visible asset and every handler has a team at her back.

They come in for the first time after hours of leaving her to sweat out her fear.  There are always three of them: one to ask questions in Russian, one to translate to English, and one to silently force her to talk.  His technique is basic and brutal, his fists calloused at the start of each session and slick with blood at the end.  

She gives them nothing, because they haven’t even figured out yet that she speaks Russian, taking her foolishly at face value when she spits out every sarcastic response in English through bloody teeth.  Because she may be alone and her government may write her into history as a traitor but she won’t prove them right.  Because her team may have abandoned her, but she won’t give them up.  Because somewhere back at home Kara and her parents still need protection.

She can’t see properly out of one eye and at least two of her teeth and half of her ribs are broken when they finally give up.  Her body has given in, thinning down in most places but swelling halfheartedly around broken bones in others; what they’ve lacked in creativity they’ve made up for in savagery, taking and taking and taking from her body what they couldn’t get out of her in intelligence.

They give up and throw her in a hole, somewhere mercifully cool after days and days and days in a hotbox.  She curls around broken ribs and broken jaw and broken fingers as best she can and rests her fractured cheekbone against the cold stone floor and waits to freeze to death.

* * *

They don’t let her die.

She’s given food and water, which she resolutely ignores, and then they drag her from the room into a medical bay, cuffing her to a bed and forcing an IV into her arm.  They don’t let her die, and slowly, despite her best efforts to the contrary, her body starts to heal.  

They wheel her from one medical bay to another, talking over her head in Russian, and she follows as best she can; the terminology is more scientific than her Russian allows, though, and before she can decipher anything a needle is jabbed into her neck and she fades out.

* * *

She wakes up, groggy and uncertain, to a general snapping orders at her.  Her body snaps to attention, his rank prodding her to action, and her hand pops up to a salute.

“Good,” he says after a moment.  “Your orders.”

A folder is slapped down on the table, the cyrillic letters unfamiliar but the words computing regardless.  Wetwork, to be kept quiet if possible; a silent job in the middle of the night.  No survivors.

There’s a uniform waiting for her, stealthy and dark except for the red star emblazoned on the left shoulder; it’s not American issue but her fingers put it on without hesitation, finding buttons in new places habitually anyways.  The weapons are Soviet-made, not American, but she matches bullets to magazines and loads them into the guns without a misstep.

The general looks at her, pleased, and sends her on her way.  

She rappels with a team-- silent, young, apprehensive as they stare at her-- down the side of a building to an apartment halfway up from the street.  The blade sheathed at her hip is nearly as long as her forearm and technically too much for picking through the lock of a tenth-story window latch, the specifications of which she knows as if she grew up in this building herself, but it does the job and she swings into the apartment easily.

Her boots are too heavy to land quietly and the muted  _ thud _ is enough to draw a man out of the bedroom, tousled hair and sleepy eyes that go wide at the sight of her and her guns and her knife.  She hurls the knife at him just as he opens his mouth to yell out and the blade buries itself in his throat with a wet thunk.

He falls, dead and bloody, and she collects the knife and moves on.  There’s a woman in the bed, cowering; the same knife cuts across her throat.  Another bedroom door opens and another man, too similar to the first to be unrelated, appears, and her arm cocks back with the knife once more just before a ten-year-old peers around his leg.  Long blonde hair and wide blue eyes ( _ Kara, _ growing into and out of Alex’s hand-me-downs, crying as Alex left for military service, sending pictures and letters every week) and she pauses, jaw clenching.

Her name is Alex Danvers, and she is not a murderer.

She lowers her arm, the knife clattering to the floor, and backs away, looking from the girl to the dead couple to the blood on her hands, back and forth and back and forth and suddenly she’s blindsided by a tackle, the remaining man throwing her into the wall.  She doesn’t fight back as his fist lands on her cheek, her ribs, her stomach; the pain blooming throughout her body brings back overheated rooms and questioning military officers and a blindingly bright clarity of  _ My name is Alex Danvers and I am not a murderer _ .

The windows shatter inwards with bullets, the team across the street ripping the walls apart, the preference of silence giving way to the need to finish the job.  The man pummeling her falls, bullets in his chest, and the little girl across the apartment screams.  Alex moves without thinking, diving across to shelter the child just as a grenade is lobbed into the apartment.  She grabs the child and gets a bite to the side of the neck for her effort, but manages to make it into the hallway and a stairwell as the explosion rocks the whole building.  

She curls around the screaming child in a corner and everything around her shatters and falls and she prays that protecting this little girl, not orphaning her, will be the last thing she does.

* * *

There are bright lights with fuzzy edges all around her, and she can’t move her left arm.  

Somewhere people are talking, but it’s too muddled, too soft, too far for her to understand.  The bed is hard, but it’s probably not her bed; Kara probably came in again to stay in her room and they haven’t both fit in her bed in years, so they moved to the floor, padding it with blankets as best they could.  She’s always sore when they do this, but it’s worth it, waking up to the sound of her parents making breakfast downstairs and to the sight of Kara sleeping peacefully, no longer dreaming of the fire that killed her birth parents.

The volume around her increases, the blurry edges sharpening, and she looks to find Kara and instead sees a table full of medical equipment.

She tries to sit up, but her shoulders are strapped down.  Questions form deep in her chest but her throat is too dry to put anything audible behind them, and she reaches reaches reaches for something-- someone-- anything--

Her left arm finally moves, and a metallic whine echoes from it.  She pulls and pulls, the weight on her left side heavier than the right, and squints against the bright lights to focus on her hand and--

\--it’s metal.  

Her fingers are encased in metal, and her wrist, and her forearm.  It whistles softly with each movement, and she frowns at the--

“Ah, you’re awake.”  He speaks English, his pronunciation too precise for it to be his native language, and he peers down at her through narrow spectacles.  “How are you feeling?”

Her mouth moves with no sound, her throat aching, and he shakes his head, a hand soft on her uncovered arm.  

“Don’t push yourself, my dear,” he says.  “We’re just glad you’re awake.”

“Explosion,” she manages to mumble, squinting at him.  “There was--”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”  He grips her hand gently.  “I’m sorry to say that no one else survived.”

Alex’s brow furrows, her brain hunting for the words to articulate her questions, to see if the child survived, why she’d killed--

“Your sister didn’t make it,” he goes on.  He’s stroking the back of her hand and Alex can feel it, but her brain isn’t registering it.  With his free hand he produces a photograph of a hollowed-out carcass of an apartment, fragmented walls and scorched floors, scatters of clothes and toys and shoes along the periphery of the blast zone.

There’s a body, half visible under rubble, narrow shoulders and singed blonde hair and burned skin and dead open eyes that are as blue as-- blue like--

“Kara,” she manages to grind out, shaking her head and screwing her eyes shut. “No, no--”

“It’s true,” he says, soothing and gentle, his hand still on hers.  “Your sister is dead.  You had a job to do, to protect your family, and you failed, and your sister died.”  His hand leaves hers and moves to her hair, gentle and cruel and a sob breaks out of her, because she let her sister die.

She lashes out blindly with her metallic arm,throwing the doctor with strength she’s never had before; there are screams in the room that might be hers or might not be hers as she rips free of the restraints holding her down, barrelling out towards something, someone--

A needle jabs into her neck, and her body freezes and collapses instantly.  As she’s fading out from her spot sprawled on the floor, his voice returns in her ear, velvety smooth on sticky warm breath.

“Your sister died because you abandoned your mission.  You must always finish your mission.”

* * *

Her arm was blown off when the building exploded, her body not enough to protect the girl-- her  _ sister _ \-- from the blast.  They saved her, the only one left alive, healed her, rebuilt her.  Her sister all but died at her hand, but she has a new hand now, a mission, a new way to protect and to serve.

She fades away, Alex melting to soldier, soldier to weapon, weapon to tool.  She sleeps, and she sleeps, and she sleeps, until they wake her with a mission.

She shoots a despot in an open convertible, a direct hit to the head in the middle of a parade in dry heat, and they gruffly pat her on the back and guide her to a chair that’s familiar but not, the air smelling of copper and burned skin.  It hurts, her teeth clenching around the rubber in her mouth, but she’s given assurances that she won’t remember, and she doesn’t.

* * *

She rams a car off the road with a truck, reaches into the wreckage and snaps the necks of the man and woman inside to finish her mission.  A picture of a young boy flutters out of the purse of the woman, edges curling in the heat of the fire, and she glances at it for a moment before leaving.  Her mission is to kill the man and woman, and her mission is complete.

The chair doesn’t look familiar, but both her human arm and her metal one fit neatly into the armrests, the leather compressed under and around them, between her fingers.  Her teeth fit perfectly into the notches in the mouthpiece.

The pain is familiar as it rips through her, in a distant and quiet way, like the leather chair that’s given in and molded to fit around her body.

* * *

They tell her a weapons dealer is on the loose, and she hunts him down from a helicopter in Iran.  The heat is unbearable, the air shimmering in waves as she squints through the scope at the car in her sights.

The driver is smart, a hand holding the dealer’s head down, the barest glimpse of her red hair visible near the steering wheel.  It’s a bad shot by any standards, and she shifts, breathes, fires a bullet into the front tire instead.  The car careens through a guardrail and off a cliff, and the helicopter dips closer.  

She rappels down, weapon in one hand, and lands in a crouch on the cliff across the ravine from the wrecked guardrail, waiting.  A door falls open and out comes the weapons dealer, stumbling and dazed and shielded by the driver. The driver has a gun, too small to be accurate from this distance.

She waits, counting meters and wind speed, and fires.  A half a second passes from the recoil to the impact and the driver snaps over at the waist, the bullet ripping through her abdomen and into the chest of the dealer.  He falls, limp, and rattles down the cliffside.  If the bullet hadn’t killed him, the fall would have.

The driver slumps, curled around the bullet wound and staring down at the dead dealer.

She radios up to the helicopter and catches the rope sent down for her, latching in on the harness and letting herself be pulled up.  She watches as the driver disappears from her sight, a redheaded pinprick fading into the cliffside.

* * *

At some point, the chair changed and the orders stopped coming in only Russian, though the pain stayed constant every time she went back to sleep.


	2. Chapter 2

A rogue operative needs to be taken out.  She’s the failsafe for the team in place, and she waits, miles away in the funnel point, for a black truck to careen towards her full of bulletholes and broken glass.

She fires a grenade under the truck and ducks, just enough, allowing it to careen over her head with the explosion; by the time she walks over-- slow, uneven steps; her boots heavy and arm heavier-- the target has disappeared and left nothing but a wrecked truck and a hole down into the sewers behind him.

She follows, hunting through the sewers with a rifle slung over her back, tracking him to an apartment building.  The building across the street has height and a proper ledge on the roof, and she props herself up to wait, peering through the scope until, finally, a light goes on in a window.

Her bullet blows through the wall, another right behind it, and the target drops.  Her hands have barely dismantled the rifle when a blur blasts out of the building, catapulting onto the nearest roof and sprinting towards her.  She leaves the rifle and runs-- the mission isn’t complete until she’s back in the chair, and the mission has to be finished, regardless of if there’s a sniper rifle left behind-- and runs until she runs out of roof.  She turns and a slice of bright metal whistles towards her and she snatches it out of the air with her mechanical arm, the vibration running from her metal wrist all the way down her human spine.  She flings it back and doesn’t wait to see if it hits the mark before leaping off the building and disappearing into the shadows.

* * *

Her mission continues and takes her to a bridge, following the loose ends that chased her across a series of rooftops and the leaking asset in the car with it.  She leaps from a moving truck to the roof of a car, discarding the asset easily with the help of a speeding truck nearby, and sets to work on the rest of the targets in the car.

She’s thrown off the car when it skids to a halt and cars whizz by, loud and full of useless scared people, and she advances methodically, dispatching the team and splitting the targets.  There’s a flash of blonde hair as she fires a rocket towards the bright shield that she’d thrown days earlier--

_ (“Come on, if we’re late again we’ll get detention!”  Her hair, long and blonde, is neatly pinned back and flashes in the sunlight filtering through the kitchen windows; her eyes, big and blue. Her arms are wrapped around a stack of schoolbooks, fingers drumming impatiently. _

_ “I’m getting there, okay,” Alex mumbles through a yawn, her own books half-falling out of her hands.  “Are you ever going to stop being such a morning person?” _

_ A cheerful “Not on your life!” is tossed back at her.) _

\--and she pauses for a just a moment before she launches off the bridge, following the pinprick of red hair and the sound of people screaming, because she has a mission, not a name.  She lands a shot into the redhead’s shoulder eventually, though it’s not a clean kill, and she climbs up onto the roof of a car for her next shot.

She’s cut off by the same blonde flying at her shield-first, fists throwing punches stronger even than the ones her mechanical arm can muster, speed and reach edging her opponent to an advantage.

_ (“I’m going to miss you.”  There are tears soaking into the shoulder of her blouse, blonde hair and tight arms around her, unwilling to let go, and she holds on just as tightly.  “Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone, Kara, you promise?”) _

The shield is heavy and balances on her forearm perfectly, and she flings it back across the street.  The target ducks and dodges and comes at her again, landing hits and dodging knife strikes by inches at best.  A quick spin leaves them back-to-back and suddenly a hand grabs under her chin and throws with inhuman strength; she flies through the air and slams onto the asphalt, landing in a roll without her goggles or mask.

“Alex?”

_ (“Alex, please.  Don’t-- you have so many choices, you could go to any school, why do you have to go to the military?”  _

_ “I want to help, and I just-- I have to do this.  You get that, right?  Tell me you understand that.” _

_ “I understand, but that doesn’t mean I want you to leave!  You’re my sister!”) _

“Who the hell is Alex?”

_ (My name is Alex Danvers, and I am not a murderer.) _

She’s thrown into a parked car from something slamming powerfully into her back, an explosion rocketing her even further away.  Her ears ring and the metal in her arm grates against itself, the gears crunching from the explosive impact, and she leaves the team for the clean-up when a helicopter picks her up and whisks her away.

* * *

“You’ve shaped the century.”

She sits in her chair, surrounded by gold bars and heavy doors-- it could be a bank vault, though she’s never thought to look around before-- while they fix the circuits and joints in her mechanical arm.

“I’m asking you to do it again.”  He’s wearing a suit, a grey suit, and he looks at her not with the expectation of a military commander or the dispassionate distance of a hand directing a tool, but like he hopes she’ll agree with him.

“There was a woman on the bridge,” she says.  “I knew her.”

“You met her earlier this week.  She’s your target.”

“I knew her.”  Her brow creases, the movement unfamiliar and the muscles uncertain, as if she hasn’t used her brain in years.  

He slaps her across the face and her head whips to the side.  Her muscles don’t tense at the blow; her breathing barely changes.  There are flickers and pieces, brief reflections of distant places and dying people, but nothing stills long enough for her to grab, to remember, except for leather chairs and rubber mouthpieces and recited lists that silence her mind.

“Prep her,” he says.  “I want her mission ready immediately.”

“She’s been out of cryo too long--”

They’re talking, the words spinning around her, but she digs her fingers into the armrests because she knew blonde hair and blue eyes and--

They push her back in the chair and she opens her mouth to welcome the mouthpiece, staring at the man in the suit as she does.  He leaves as they push her head back and turn their levels, flip their switches, watch as she screams around the rubber between her teeth until flickers and pieces fall away.

* * *

“Please don’t make me do this.”  She’s wearing blue almost as bright as her eyes, which are wide and worried and--

_ (“Alex, wait!”   _

_ She’s slammed with a running hug and arms that grip too tight around her, tight enough that she can’t breathe.  She grunts but returns the hug, burying her face in blonde hair. _

_ “I love you,”  There are tears, and a sad smile.  “Be safe, okay?  You promise?” _

_ “I promise.  I love you, Kara.) _

Kara.

* * *

“You know me.”  The shield clatters down and she--  _ Kara _ \-- stands in front of Alex, exhaustion bowing her broad shoulders, wider and stronger than they used to be--  

“No, I don’t.”  She throws a punch with her left arm and feels it all the way through to her right when it impacts.

“You know me.  Your name is Alexandra Elizabeth Danvers.”  One blue eye is already swollen shut and bright red blood leaks out of her cheek, her nose, her mouth, but she keeps talking anyways, refusing to fight back.  “Your mother was Eliza and your father was Jeremiah.  You’re my sister.  You adopted me when I was four years old.  You’re my sister.”

No.

Her sister-- Alex’s sister--  _ Kara _ died in an explosion, because Alex had failed at her mission.

No.

“You’re my mission.”  She throws punch after punch, the impact reverberating into her broken bones and the raging pain building in her head as she fights to hold onto her mission, her reason, her--

“Then finish it,” Kara says, head lolling to one side and mouth slick with blood.  “Because I’m not leaving you.”  She rolls her head back over just enough to see Alex with her working eye.  “You’re my sister.”

The ship collapses under them and Kara falls.  Alex dives after her, landing in the water feet-first and promptly losing all the air in her lungs because her arm is  _ broken _ and her ribs are cracked but her sister needs her and  _ My name is Alex Danvers and I am not a murderer. _

She gets ahold of Kara, metal fingers grabbing and gripping and pulling until they’re both ashore.  Kara is unconscious, battered, her blood--

No.

Her sister died.  Her sister was killed in an explosion.

She doesn’t have a name, she doesn’t have a name, she doesn’t have a--

_ (My name is Alex Danvers and I am not a murderer.) _

_ (“Your sister died because you abandoned your mission.  You must always finish your mission.”) _

 


	3. Chapter 3

She runs away-- walks away--stumbles away-- leaves the broken body of a blonde woman on the banks of a river, breathing but shattered, and disappears.

She doesn’t go back for a mission report.  She disappears into the woods, dodges search parties and helicopters, makes her way towards the coast and then north, north, north, sleeping in abandoned buildings as she does.

They come for her, those who can, what’s left of the teams that used her.  The man in the suit who slapped her months ago-- Alexander Pearce, the televisions say; God, when did televisions get so much clearer and more colorful?-- is dead and she didn’t complete her mission, doesn’t have a new one, has instead only strobing flashes of memory and feeling that fight against blocks built out of red books and Russian trigger words.

She leaves.

First it’s a cargo ship, then a train, then the back of a truck.  She dodges people as best she can and hides the unbearably obvious metal of her arm with bandages, sweaters, towels.  People around her speak in French, then in German, then in Russian; she moves from city to city, shadow to shadow.  Her right arm heals fully sometime when she’s in France, and the bones are unhappy at best, but solid nonetheless.

People stare at her, at first.  Even with her arm hidden she’s still filthy, twitchy, covered in utilitarian leather and Kevlar.  She steals clothes where she can; without the programming she’s a pretty terrible thief, though, and she’s caught more times than not.  Sometimes people are kind, taking a look at her gaunt cheeks, the way she skirts close to the exits at all times, and offer her a meal, a jacket, a bottle of water even when she can’t control her body enough to form a proper thank you; more often she’s chased out by police or angry people with bats and golf clubs.

She lands in Minsk and stays.  It’s not intentional-- she moves because she’s being chased, shadows and flashes haunting her steps-- but she collapses after two days without sleep in an abandoned warehouse for an abandoned police station and somewhere between the late winter chill and too little food and too little sleep, she gets sick.

She’s not sure what year it is, but she thinks the last time she was sick was in 1952. 

_ (“Alex, sweetie, stay in bed!”  She’s taller, blonde hair laced with silver, and she sits on the edge of the bed with a washcloth in one hand and a thermometer in the other.  “I called the school, they know you’re sick.” _

_ “I have finals, Mom!”  A deep, hacking cough trails the words out of her chest, her whole body shaking.   _

_ “You have  _ pneumonia _ ,” her mother says, sharp and stern.  “The principal said you can take your finals late.  It won’t affect your grades.”) _

Two more days pass with her curled up in a corner of the warehouse, moving only when she has to throw up, and she starts to recover.  She’s weak, her body too dehydrated and starved to support the weight of her mechanical arm.  She pulls herself up with her left arm and it weighs her whole torso down, but she manages to stagger through the warehouse.  There are crates and pallets scattered about and she stumbles from one to another, digging through them as best she can.

She finds some luck in in one of them, the crate falling apart in her hand and scattering ready-made military meals stamped with American insignia.  It’s enough food to last her for months, and she slumps down in the middle of the mess, tears one open, digs the food out.  She eats it cold and falls back asleep.

It’s midday when she wakes, and her body is still weak, her breaths coming weakly, and she stays where she is.  The warehouse has only three points of entry and two are within view, the third a rusty jammed door that will screech ostentatiously if opened; the building is decrepit and ignored, a relic of an old war in a forgotten corner of a dying neighborhood.  

She stays.

* * *

It’s not a home, necessarily, but once she can walk in a straight line she spends her nights clearing the warehouse, the buildings around her, the entire block.  There are old apartments, some of which are full of squatters, some of which are home only to rats.  One has two old men in it and they pull knives and a loaded but uncleaned gun on her; the fight ends with a shallow cut across her ribcage and both of them wheezing and broken on the floor.  There’s a mattress in the apartment, and she tosses the knives back to them and takes the gun and the mattress and one of the blankets instead.  

There are three other blankets, and pillows.  She leaves them there.

The gun is old, an American pistol similar to one she’d used to execute a doctor in his office at a hospital in Bucharest--

_ (“Please, please,” he says, hands behind his head and knees on the floor. “I have five children, they--” _

_ She shoots, the suppressor on the muzzle muffling the sound but not the recoil.  She leaves through the window, an easy exit with a body left on the floor next to an overturned desk that had been covered with pictures of his family.) _

\--and she dismantles it, fixes the broken pieces, loads it to a functioning state once more.   

* * *

She’s just lit up the small camping stove she found in one of the nearby abandoned apartments, readying a MRE to satisfy her empty stomach, when there’s a loud scuff from the other side of the warehouse floor.  Someone must have gotten in-- the windows up high in the external walls are technically a point of entry, but there’s no way to reach them without rappelling in or flying, so she hasn’t been concerned with them as a point of entry-- and she draws the gun instinctively, on her feet without meaning to be.

A woman stands with her hands up, blonde hair bright over the dark and drab of her clothes.  She has broad shoulders and blue eyes, and she keeps her empty hands up as she says “Alex, do you recognize me?”

_ (There’s a quiet knock on the door, and Alex has to use both hands to turn the knob, reaching up level with her head _ ,  _ to open it.  Her mom is a few steps behind, helping her swing the door open. _

_ It’s the neighbor, Mrs. El, and her daughter on her hip.  Her cheeks are red and her eyes look heavy with the dark under them; Kara has her head buried into her mother’s shoulder and is wearing an men’s shirt as a dress. _

_ “Alura,” Alex’s mom says, pulling Alex to the side to let them in.  “What’s wrong?” _

_ “We were robbed,” she says quietly.  “While we were at church, they took everything.” _

_ She sets Kara down and Alex takes her hand, pulling her to the living room while their mothers’ talk.  Kara is quieter than normal, shuffling along in her father’s shirt, and her efforts on the puzzle they’ve been working on for weeks is lackluster. _

_ “Alex,” her mother says from the kitchen.  “Can you please go get one of your dresses for Kara?”) _

“You lived next door.  You used to borrow my dresses.”

“That’s right.  Your family adopted me when I was four, do you remember that?”

_ (The whole building goes up in the middle of the night.  Alex’s father grabs her from under her bed, shielding her under his jacket as they run out from under the smoke.  Somewhere in the mess, Kara is crying, running around, tugging at pant’ legs and jackets in search of her parents. _

_ It’s hours before they’re found, trapped by debris in their bedroom.  They’re unrecognizable and the fireman speaks quietly to Alex’s parents while Alex follows Kara, hand in hand, still looking.) _

“There was a fire.”

“And my parents died.”  She’s closer, and the gun in Alex’s hand is suddenly so heavy, as heavy as her metal arm.  “I shared your room.  We put couch cushions on the floor with the mattress to make a big bed.”

Closer, she’s still closer, her steps slow and deliberate, and Alex wavers.  She’s tired, so tired.  Her gun is pushed to the side and away, and she doesn’t try to stop it.

“Alex, I want you to come home with me.”

_ (She hits Alex with a running hug, the force of it knocking her back three steps before she finds her footing. _

_ “Hey,” Alex says, holding on tight and balancing with five and a half feet of sister hanging off her.  “I missed you so much.” _

_ “You’re back, right?” Kara says into her shoulder.  Her fingers dig into Alex’s back, rumpling her uniform.  “You’re done?  You’re staying home?” _

_ “Not yet,” Alex says quietly, and Kara’s fingers grip even tighter.) _

“I don’t have one.”

“You do with me.  Your sister.”  Her hand is still on Alex’s wrist, soft on her heartbeat, and she doesn’t blink, doesn’t look away, doesn’t waver.  “Alex, come back with me.  I can help you.”

Kara.  This is Kara, and her name is Alex--

_ (My name is Alex Danvers and I am not a murderer.) _

\-- something pricks into her neck and there’s just enough time to see Kara’s eyes go wide before she passes out.


	4. Chapter 4

She wakes up on a table.  There’s a doctor standing over her and he speaks quietly, the words too soft to reach through the fuzzy edges of her consciousness.

_ (“It’s true,” the doctor says, soothing and gentle.  “Your sister is dead.  You had a job to do, to protect your family, and you failed, and your sister died.”)   _

She lashes out with her metallic arm,throwing the doctor through a glass wall.  A door bursts open and people flood in, some through the door and some through the shattered glass wall, all of them converging on her.  

Somewhere in the melee is a familiar voice and it’s enough, just barely, to make her hesitate.  There’s a stab into her thigh and the hold on wakefulness she’d managed to find slips away.  She can’t find familiarity anywhere but there’s someone else looking down at her, strong hands on her right arm and dark hair and green eyes pulled into a grimace, brow furrowed and mouth thinned with effort of holding her still.  

Just before she goes under, the woman helping hold her down relaxes, mouth softening and eyes turning sad and downcast.

* * *

She comes to in a chair. It’s metal and uncomfortable and the straps are familiar but the chair is not.  The straps and the chairs come before she’s wiped and her metal arm is incapacitated and the cuff on her right is too strong and she pulls and pulls and pulls until there’s a crack so loud it bounces off the sterile walls of the empty room she’s in.  

There’s no rubber mouthpiece to bite down on when the bones in her arm snap, and her scream echoes even more loudly.

* * *

This time, when she opens her eyes, she’s not alone.  The woman with blue eyes and blonde hair and broad shoulders--  _ Kara _ \-- is sitting across from her.

She’s woken up more times than she can count to hordes of men-- scientists, soldiers, suits-- but this is the first time she’s woken up in front of someone who doesn’t seem to want to use her as a tool.

She-- Kara-- Alex’s  _ sister _ \-- is talking, but her voice is far away, soft and distant and barely nudging through the blurry edges of Alex’s consciousness.

“Do you know who I am?”

_ (“Alex,” Kara whispers from her bed.  “Are you awake?” _

_ “No," Alex grumbles into her pillow. _

_ “Do you believe in heaven?” _

_ “What?”  Alex extracts her head from under the blankets, poking out to look over a Kara sleepily.  “Go to sleep.” _

_ “I don’t think I do,” Kara says.  Alex squints across to the other side of the room, to where Kara’s profile is a sharp line in the dark.  Her eyes are open wide, blue and bright even with the lights off, even with a measure of sadness in her voice.   _

_ “I don’t either,” Alex says after a moment.  “I think it’s just quiet.” _

_ “I hope so.”  Kara lets out a slow breath, and Alex’s teeth ache.  She kicks the covers away and hops out of bed, tiptoeing quickly to the other side of the room-- it’s  _ freezing _ , and her feet are bare-- until she can clamber into Kara’s bed.   _

_ “What--” _

_ “Shut up and go to sleep,” Alex mumbles.  They’re too big for this-- Kara is too tall for the bed all on her own, her frame stretching over the years until she’s finally passed Alex’s height-- but she pulls Kara to her side and holds on tight.) _

“Kara.”

Her body hurts, all the way from her toes to her teeth, but Kara smiles and it hurts a little less.

“Yeah,”  Kara says.  Her smile is vivid, so bright it almost hurts.  “Kara.  Your sister.”

_ (There’s a body, half visible under rubble, narrow shoulders and singed blonde hair and burned skin and dead open eyes that are as blue as-- blue like-- _

_ “It’s true,” he says.  “Your sister is dead.  You had a job to do, to protect your family, and you failed, and your sister died.”) _

“You died.”

_ (“Your sister died because you abandoned your mission.  You must always finish your mission.”) _

“They said you died.  They--the doctor.  I woke up and my family was dead.”

“I’m right here,” Kara says.  Her fingers twine around one another, hands unsteady on the tabletop.  It would be easy to break them, one well-placed strike--  “Do you know what year it is?”

The weapons she’s used are more refined, more reliable, more diverse and powerful; the cars faster.  She looks away, around the room, anywhere but Kara and her sadness, and her eyes fall on her hands.  They’re strapped down, one metal and the other human and covered in plaster, and her brows creases.

“It’s 2016,” Kara says.  “And your arm is broken, but it’ll heal.”

_ (“Your sister died because you abandoned your mission.  You must always finish your mission.”) _

“No...no, you died in 1954.”  Alex shakes her head, and it rattles her skull, dates and memories and flashes of home, of waking up in tanks of ice, of Kara, of punching Kara over and over and over--

“Alex.” Kara’s voice splinters and Alex--  _ my name is Alex Danvers and I am not a murdered _ \-- cracks under the weight it.  “I’m right here.  I never died. I thought you did, you were gone, but we’re both here, now.  Together.”

“How is it 2016?”

“I was asleep,” Kara says.  “For a long time.”  Her voice wavers, and the room spins around Alex, her chair and the shackles holding her to it a fixed point of familiarity.   

“You were captured.  They hurt you, and then they put you to sleep, and woke you up to use you.  Do you remember that?”

_ (“I knew her.” _

_ “You met her earlier this week.  She’s your target.” _

_ “I knew her.”   _

_ He slaps her across the face and her head whips to the side.) _

“You were on a bridge.  We were on a bridge.”

“Right!”  Kara smiles, bright and uncertain, and the spinning room slows.  “In Washington.  That’s when I realized it was you.”

_ (She throws punch after punch and every hit vibrates through the metal in her left arm, into her chest and down her spine, through the broken bones and cracked ribs. _

_ “Then finish it,” Kara says, head lolling to one side and mouth slick with blood.  “Because I’m not leaving you.”) _

“I tried to kill you.”  Her vision blurs, the ache in her head growing, and nausea builds in her stomach.  “You were my mission.”

“That wasn’t you,” Kara says.  Her hands twitch, moving inches closer to Alex’s side of the table, and Alex’s left hand grips at the chair tight enough for the metal to grind audibly.  “They wiped your mind, that wasn’t you.  This is you, right here.  This is you.”

“This is me?” Alex says.

_ My name is Alex Danvers and I am not a murderer. _

“Yes,” Kara says.

The nausea pulls back and the room spins more slowly.

_ My name is Alex Danvers _ .

* * *

She wakes up shackled to a chair.  Her fingers flex, or try to flex-- half of them are immobilized in a cast, and she looks down at it, puzzled.

“Alex?”

There’s a woman-- a  _ target _ \-- in front of her, and she lunges forward, yanking with her metal arm until it starts to pull free from the shackle.

“Alex, it’s me, it’s Kara--”

The door bursts open and a swarm of people run in.  A woman with dark hair plants herself in front of the target, a tranquilizer gun aimed steadily at--

She breaks out of the shackle with her metal arm and rips through the clasp on the other cuff, leaping from the chair.  A dart slams into her chest just before she tackles the other woman out of the way and lunges for the target.  Her limbs go heavy under the tranquilizer spreading through her body and she’s hauled back into the chair.  

* * *

“Hey there.”  Kara is sitting across from her again.  Alex's limbs are restrained, her muscles heavy and sore from too long without moving; Kara's clothes are different and the circles under her eyes are broader and darker.  

Alex tried to kill her yesterday.  Her hands flex against she shackles reflexively.

“Do you remember--”

“My name is Alex Danvers,” Alex mutters.

“Yeah,” Kara says.  A grin, bright and toothy and light, spreads across her face.

“I--I’m sorry about,” Alex starts.  “About-- yesterday?  Today?”

“It was yesterday,” Kara says.  “And it’s okay.  It’ll take time.”

“Who shot me?” Alex says.

“Why--”

“She was there,” Alex says.  She shakes her head, pushing at lingering programming and the soft edges of a tranquilizers.  “On the bridge, and on the ship, and yesterday.  She fought for you.”

“Lucy,” Kara says.  “My friend, Lucy.”

“She’s not afraid of me,” Alex says.

“Well, to be fair, she’s very good with a tranq gun,” Kara says with a small smile.  “Do you want to meet her?”

“No,” Alex says quickly.  “No, not-- not like this.”

“Okay,” Kara says.  “Do you think you’d be okay talking to some doctors?”

Alex is quiet, staring down at the blank table in front of her.  Kara waits, and waits, until Alex finally shakes her head.

“Okay,” Kara says again.  “Maybe tomorrow.”

* * *

The next morning, she wakes up in Caracas, on her way to dispatch a warlord.  The cast on her arm cracks as she pulls free just before she’s shot with a tranquilizer.

By the afternoon, she’s broken the table in front of her and still needs a new cast, but she remembers Kara.


	5. Chapter 5

That she can tell, Alex has been awake-- so to speak; functioning, perhaps, is more accurate-- as  _ Alex _ for two weeks.  An inconsistent two weeks, filled with stuttering starts and stops, but two weeks.

Kara hasn’t been in to see her yet today.  She’s had her breakfast, a shower under the watchful eyes of armed guards, a chance to stretch before settling back into her shackles.  She has more room to move, now, the chains on the shackles long enough that she can hold a book, drink from a bottle of water,  scratch her nose.

The cast is gone, but the splint that replaced it still itches horribly.

The door opens, and instead of Kara, in walks--

“Lucy,” she says by way of introduction.  “We haven’t officially met yet.”

“I think you shot me a few times,” Alex says.

“I think you threw me off of a helicarrier once,” Lucy shoots back with a smile as she settles into her chair.  “Kara’s off on a mission, so I said I’d come sit with you today.”

“Even though I threw you off a helicarrier?”

“Well, like you said,” Lucy says.  She tilts her chair back on the rear legs.  “I did shoot you a few times.”

“How do you know Kara?”

“Do you mean Kara, or do you mean Captain America?”

“What?”

“Oh, man, do you not know about her being the Cap?” One of Lucy’s eyebrows cranks up, her head tilting to the side.  

“The what?”

“Oh, man,” Lucy says again, dropping her chair back down onto all fours and leaning on the table.  “Well, the short version is: during the Cold War, the government wanted a couple of propaganda puppets, some super shiny and beautiful perfect Americans to counteract any potential secret Soviet propaganda.  Kara volunteered to be their lady puppet, except the lab was destroyed before they could get their boy puppet, so they only had Kara.”

“What did they--”

“The serum made her super strong, super fast, super everything,” Lucy says, swirling her hands around.  “Though you’d know more than me if she was always that obnoxiously blonde and blue eyed.”

“She was,” Alex says quietly.

“Right,” Lucy says with a shrug.   “Anyways.  Kara was their super soldier, super visible asset, super everything.  Later on in the war, there was a computer glitch and the general holding the launch codes for the US thought the Soviets had launched a bunch of nukes at us, so he fired one back.  He was wrong, so they sent Kara out to basically bring the nuke down before it sent everything to shit.  She took it down somewhere off the coast of Greenland, I think, and went down with it.”

Alex breaks the arm of the chair.

“She’s here now.” Lucy’s shoulders stay relaxed even as one hand falls casually to rest on the tranquilizer gun holstered at her hip.  Her voice is soft, her eyes calm, and the creak of metal from Alex’s clenched fist fades away after a long moment.  “Alive and well.  Focus on that, okay?”

“Okay,” Alex mumbles.

“You good?” Lucy raises an eyebrow and makes a show of pulling her hand a few inches away from the gun.  “I’d hate to have to drop your ass yet again, after all.”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“Hey, I was pararescue,” Lucy says, pointing sharply across the table at Alex.  “Emphasis on the rescue.  Just because I  _ can _ kick ass and look great doing it doesn’t mean that it’s what I want to do.”

“So you’re military?  Officially?” Alex’s shoulders relax minutely, her left arm pulling away from the broken side of the chair and settling easily across her lap.  The thin metallic whine that follows the movement sharpens the silence as Lucy waits until she’s settled.

“Was,” Lucy says after a few heartbeats.  “Army, two tours.”

“Where?”

“Here and there,” Lucy says vaguely.  “Wherever they needed a team of idiots with magic wings to bail people out, basically.  Mostly Iraq.”

“Iraq?” Alex’s nose crinkles, a distantly familiar movement, reminiscent of studying in the living room with Kara, trying to puzzle through calculus and history lessons.  She spent a few weeks on a mission in Afghanistan in 1979 and a few fleeting nights afterwards on wetwork in Kabul, but there had never been a war in Iraq for her to affect.

“Don’t tell me you need a current events lesson,” Lucy drawls.

Alex snaps her mouth shut, jaw tense and eyes focusing down on the metal of her arm.  

“I just meant-- sorry,” Lucy says.  “I thought you remembered everything, is all.”

“I remember when I was awake,” Alex says.  She pulls her eyes back up to meet Lucy’s, squaring her shoulders as best she can.  “Wasn’t awake all that much, though.”

“Right,” Lucy says.  “Well, in that case, let’s get you caught up.”  She winks at Alex and drags her chair over to sit next to Alex, settling in casually and propping her feet on the table.  “So let’s start from the beginning, yeah?  You were captured in ‘55, right?”

Alex nods apprehensively, leaning away from Lucy and fiddling with the broken shackle, trying to fit it back around her metal arm.  Not even Kara has tried to sit next to her yet, but Lucy wiggles down into her chair a bit more and pulls her phone out of her pocket, calling one of the staff and telling them she needs a laptop in the room.  She winks over at Alex, who ducks her head and focuses on her breathing.

One of the nurses appears with a laptop and a guard, the guard automatically moving to replace the broken shackle at her left wrist.  Lucy waves him off with a glare and a sharp  _ “Dismissed” _ thrown his way.

She’s spent the last two weeks as Alex Danvers, human being, cataloging the past six decades of memories from The Winter Soldier, programmable weapon.  Every mission she completed is meticulously filed away in her memory, the triple digit count of assassinations she carried out detailed in complete mission reports that she can recall with minimal effort.  Every time she returned to the same bunker, the same chair, the same mouthpiece and orders and  _ cold _ is a pristine and clear record in her mind.  

It’s been 61 years since the last time someone sat beside her without trying to restrain her.


End file.
